Hi, I'm one of the upstream maintainers of FFTW. I'm not a Debian maintainer, but I do use Debian (as does my co-author), and just wanted to say that we will be happy to work with whoever the new Debian FFTW packager is.
Cordially, Steven G. Johnson PS. Thanks to James for his long efforts with FFTW for Debian; it's been a pleasure working with him, and I wish him well in his future endeavors.